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The pitch: No 190: IFSRA

At the end of the day, footballers give them 110% to compensate for the fact that they find it difficult to use them at all. Kids use them to pester for products promoted by advertisers who, in turn, deploy them to exaggerate their benefits. Writers use them to make things up, politicians to dissemble and the legal profession to obfuscate. All of which proves, to quote Conrad, that words are the great foes of reality.

Financial institutions tend to use words in one of two ways: economically when explaining their own behaviour, and voluminously when blinding customers with jargon. Cawley Nea’s ad for the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority cleverly parodies this latter characteristic, transposing financial institutions’ jargon onto an everyday domestic setting.

Like the recent NTL ad, the commercial both refracts and yields meaning in the same vein as Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketches that twist words such as